Last night I woke up to gunshots outside my window. 1, 2, 3, 4, rapidfire and over in a second, but unmistakable. When you’re not prepared for it, it has a weird effect. In the silence that follows every sound is magnified a hundredfold. Every footfall, every dog bark, echoes off the walls like a thunderclap. The thunder doesn’t help matters.
I walk outside, wanting to go down to the kitchen and be around something comforting. Or eat something. Mostly eat something. But my room in the compound is detached from the main house. There are four rooms on the second floor, locked off by another iron gate from the already locked in house. And there, in that moment, I’m a caged animal, trapped and scared and confused and far from home and alone.
And then I lose it. Waves of panic crash over me like they haven’t in years, and my heart is pounding through my throat and up into my brain and I can’t think or feel, fear just takes over. I run my tongue along my teeth, remembering how in the dreams I just woke from they were all crooked and falling out. How many times I turned my teeth in my gums and it hurt so real and I’m scared and alone and crazy and a helpless child.
So I do what any not sane person would do – I start knocking on doors. At one in the morning. In a house full of people I met this morning who already know me only as the outsider in the group. The door is unlocked and I push it open, and a startled med student looks back at me.
It’s awkward, but he’s nice about it. In retrospect it must have been so weird, but at the time it felt so painfully necessary. Just to be close to someone, to feel connected, to not be alone. We sat up and talked for an hour, and after the thunder died down I finally went back to sleep. I don’t remember what we talked about. Travel and helping people and capitalism and movies and Seattle. Even my boyfriends usually want me to fuck off after a couple minutes of panic attacking them, but this guy was so genuinely alright with it.
I remember he said one thing that stuck with me. “Life is doable.” I don’t remember the context, but I like it. Life is doable. And it is. I went back to bed, and drifted into another dream where all my teeth fell out.
-
Today I went on a tour of the city. This mostly consisted of sitting on the back of a motorcycle and driving past various buildings long enough for them not to make any lasting impression.
“You see?” LouLou, the driver, says as he points out the National Palace.
“Mhmm,” I answer. I don’t see. As a matter of fact, past the fence I can’t see much of anything. A yard, and behind that, not a building. Maybe he’s showing it to me because it was destroyed in the earthquake? I would ask, but his French is even more broken than mine. If I’d actually researched anything about this country before showing up, I’d probably already know the answer. But I didn’t, and I don’t.
I find my days spent for the most part hoping people don’t talk to me. Not that I don’t want to talk to them, it’s just exhausting trying to speak French when the reality is that I really don’t speak French.
My friend Milo from work took me to the Brazilian Cultural Center so I could ask about capoeira classes. He says he wants to learn Portuguese. I try to teach him some things, but it’s difficult to teach one language you don’t really speak in another you speak only marginally better. I feel like the Dos Equis man – She speaks Portuguese, in French. I manage to teach him Bom dia and Tudo bem, but I falter when trying to explain why they’re pronounced the way they are.
“You see,” I start to say, “a d is pronounced like a j, but only when it comes before an i. Or an e, but only when the e sounds like an i. And an m at the end of a word just sounds like you’re nose is stuffed up, but doesn’t really make a noise.” I gave up after J.
My coworker’s daughter came to the office today. If I had to guess, I’d say she was about three, but I know children tend to look younger here. A visible side effect of early poverty and malnourishment, the small stature of so many people. Milo is an inch shorter than me, and must weigh about half of what I do.
Not speaking Creole and being very lazy about my French, I never quite got the girl’s name. For the longest time, she refused to speak back when I talked to her.
“Ça va?” I’d ask, like an overbearing mother to a show poodle. She’d blink at me with confused brown eyes. I can imagine her mind whirring. “What is this strange pinkish creature that looks like my mom but is fatter and has creepy pale skin? Is it some kind of alien?”
I promptly give up on us ever being friends. I turn to Milo. “She doesn’t like me,” I say. He laughs. Then the girl discovers she can open the drawer at my feet, and she does so over and over again. There’s a folder inside, containing some articles on Gender Based Violence..
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I ask, still like I’m talking to a poodle. She laughs louder and louder. She loves me now, the creepy pale alien girl. She finally comes to accept that aliens have names too, and she can’t stop shouting mine. ANNA! AAANNNNAA! BANANA! BANANA ANNA BANANANA! It goes on and on. My smile slides into a grimace and I turn back to my work.
When I say work, I mean my first week “homework.” And by homework, I actually mean homework. I have French grammar exercises. Little fill in the blank sentences like “Valerie goes to bed early tonight so that…” and I have to complete the sentence. After my junior year of high school, I really thought we were past all of this.
But the old habits quickly come back along with my stranger French vocabulary. “Valerie goes to bed early tonight so that tomorrow she can go on a killing spree.” The French word for killing spree is tuelrie, which sounds like a kind of doily. If stopped on the street and asked by a nice old lady if I felt like a tuelrie, I’d probably pack a picnic basket.
The rest of the sentences don’t fare much better.
“Veronique is always in good humor despite her lack of legs.”
“I must spend the day in the garden so that I can bury the bodies.”
“Jean has a vegetable for a penis.”
–
There are armed guards at the supermarkets here. Stray dogs with two rows of bulging tits that drag on the ground hunt for scraps in the gutter. I saw two tall, thin naked men bathing in the river today. I wanted to lean over and shout “Um. Hi, excuse me, DON’T YOU KNOW THAT HAS CHOLERA?” But of course they do. They don’t have a choice.
I do, though. I chose to be here. I can leave at any time, in a country full of people who can’t. It’s amazing how slums look beautiful from far away. The rust on the tops of tin shantytown roofs could be red brick on the coast of Dubrovnik when viewed from an air conditioned room high above the city.
I wore shorts today, which apparently makes people think I’m a prostitute. I burned my leg on the side of the motorcycle. Still we drive around and around, pausing only long enough at each place for none of it to make much impression. The heat, the people, the buildings, the rubble, the poverty.
I’m traumatized by how little I’m traumatized.
